


You pick Undyne up from the gym

by morefishplease



Series: Comfy Fish Stories [44]
Category: Undertale (Video Game)
Genre: Car Accidents, Driving, F/M, Gyms, POV First Person, Stream of Consciousness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-29
Updated: 2017-04-29
Packaged: 2018-10-25 05:04:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10757274
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/morefishplease/pseuds/morefishplease
Summary: What it says in the title. Due to having originally been written and posted for a different site most of my stories' titles are just descriptions of the story, and I'm too lazy to make up meaningful titles for everything.





	You pick Undyne up from the gym

When I get out of the gym I let the cold air hit me and I shudder a little. It feels good but I’m still sweaty and it’s starting to get cold. Soon I’ll have to trade my tank top for my windbreaker. I run hot so it just makes it feel colder. After working out, though, there’s nothing that compares to letting that first big wash of fresh air hit you. If it’s cold enough you can feel the sweat hardening on your scales and it feels like what being frozen in ice must feel like, I imagine. It’s neat for like a minute but then it just feels cold. Every day I fight the urge to shiver because I figure I’d look dumb if I shivered. I hate when I think people think I look dumb. This one time

This car just pulled up next to me and honked and I was totally not paying attention and I almost jumped out of my scales. I put on my meanest face and looked over but it was just my big dumb dork of a boyfriend. He rolls down the window, tells me he’s here to give a ride. I ask him how he knew when I’d be getting out of the gym and he says he’s been waiting for the last twenty minutes.

I’m not good with words like he is. I thought about it a lot before I wrote this sentence and I figure the best means of expression I have is physical. Like, not punches or whatever because even I know that’s a cliché, but I mean how I walk or how I carry myself. I’m kind of proud of that, I can like get a lot of meaning across in that way. Whenever I try to write I get really clipped, and it’s the same when I talk. I’m a total dork when I talk, really. I hate the sound of my voice. I used to love it, when I was a kid, but then I found out that you don’t actually sound the way you hear yourself, and then I recorded my voice and listened to it and I was shocked at how dumb I sound. Ever since then that’s kind of colored it for me.

This is another thing too when I write, I meander a lot. My boyfriend likes it; sometimes he tells me to write him notes, like if I have to get up earlier than him, or leave him a message on his phone or whatever, and I’ll get distracted and it ends up being ten minutes long. I feel mad dumb when I do that, my cheeks burn when he points it out. I blush a lot around him but he likes that too, that dork. He likes everything I do, or so he says. I don’t know if I believe him.

Okay. I’m hauling myself back on track. When he tells me he’s been waiting for me for twenty minutes I feel my gills puff up and my fins tuck back. I can’t help myself, it just happens. Even if I could help myself I don’t know if I would, cause I know he likes it and even if I try not to act like it it makes me smile sometimes, even if it’s just to myself. Either way I can’t let him know that, not at all. He wouldn’t think I was so cool if he knew how easy it was for him to make me swoon like that, so I punch him on the shoulder but kind of lightly and I go around and get in. We end up holding hands over the console and I’m kind of blushing but trying really hard not to. He’s driving though so I guess it’s okay, he has to be looking at the road, right?

While we’re getting off the highway he sort of glances over at me. This is a problem because I’ve totally been staring at him, so I look away real quick, run a hand through my hair. He asks me if I’d talked to my mom lately and

Okay, sometimes I get like a real violent

Well, not violent. Violent is the wrong word. A strong physical reaction to social situations. Sometimes if I go to a place where there’s too many people I’ll feel really glassy and frozen and just hang around in the background looking cool – which I’m an expert at, by the way. This time it’s kind of like I’ve just been impaled on a big iron spike, all the way out my mouth. I feel like I’m choking and like I can’t turn my head and it passes in a minute but it must have showed on my face because he frowns, asks me if I’m okay and I’m like no no I’m cool um what did you say???

You have to say it with three question marks, that’s like the appropriate level of nonchalance. He says it again and I don’t feel it this time but I’m repeating my mantra (ice cold ice cold over and over again, tell anyone and I’ll murder the heck out of you, swear on my gills). I tell him no, I haven’t, and he asks why not. I just tell him that me and my mom don’t have the best relationship, and he’s looking over and I start to roll my eyes and tell him to keep his eyes on the road, stupid

and that’s when we                                        C

and i reel from the                                          R

my fins tighten against the                             A

the seatbelt locks cause of the                       S

I get a wicked bruise from the                       H

and I’m tough right but when you go from forty to zero in under a second you still get the wind knocked out of you and I’m woozy for a little bit and I’m coughing and I can’t feel my gills but I look over and oh! time jolts like lightning and I’m moving in wicked slomo like I do when I’m in a fight and I rip myself out of the car, feel my muscles bulge, feel my vision return and I can SEE again and I’ve pounced over my big dumb broken boyfriend cradled his head in my hands licked the blood from his scalp and some dull animal part of me that’s still concerned with thinking notes that I’m crooning a low sweet song of murmured nothings over him, a repetitive mess of ‘hey hey hey say hey kid just breathe be cool reeelax listen you’re cool you’re cool I’m here airbag went off fine see I’m here I’m here hey dork wake up please wake up for me wake up wake UP’ and I think I shout the last part and he cracks his eyes open a little and smiles at me and  that’s when the ambulances get there and they have to sedate me to get me off him.

 

▪ ▪ ▪

 

They spend way too much time checking on me in the hospital, no matter how much I tell them I’m fine, really, I ought to know. Eventually they’re satisfied and I get to go check on the dummy, but he’s sleeping, so I just curl up in a chair and watch him, making sure my nerves are ready to snapfire me away, make me look down or pretend to be sleeping if he wakes up. He’s deep, though, but he doesn’t look too banged up. The flood of relief that pours through me is like ice and I want to do something to take my mind off it. I ask the nurse for some paper and she’s nice enough to go and get it for me even though we both know she doesn’t have to. I rummage around, find a pen, force my shaky handwriting to make sense:

 

Dear Mom,

**Author's Note:**

> This was the first time I'd experimented with writing from Undyne's perspective and I thought it worked out reasonably well. I think the main problem with this is how conversational it is considering it's not framed as a diary entry or anything. Later on these stories do end up being diary entries and I think that works a lot better due to a certain quirk I introduce.
> 
> I think the ending of this story is a little cliche but I'm not really setting any standards for serious literature here anyway, so sometimes the best thing to do is to just embrace it. Personally I hate the new sort of alt-lit post-ironic bullshit that people get up to; there's noting wrong with being kitschy if you at least acknowledge you're being kitschy, but going into it with a wink and a nod and sort of begging your audience not to take you too seriously is just stupid and self-referential and I hate that. 
> 
> The whole thing with the crash is a little tacky, I think, mostly because it doesn't really mean anything - it doesn't do anything that just a normal paragraph can't do as well. You can argue that the overall effect is that Undyne's thoughts are getting jumbled from the force of the crash but it's a clumsy and inelegant way of doing it and it doesn't jive with the rest of the story. It also looks better in Word and in pastebin where I can format it so that there's no little choppiness between the letters. I tried to get it to work right but in this text editor tab doesn't work and I'm not going to count characters to get it just right, so imagine that they're all in a nice straight line.


End file.
